Medical service providers, such as physicians, often provide services to their patients in an office (clinic or facility) or other ambulatory treatment environment. A typical clinic visit may be considered as a sequence of related interactions between the patient and the staff of the service provider. For example, the patient may first be greeted and logged in by a receptionist. The patient may then be called by a nurse and taken from the reception area to one of a plurality of examination rooms. The nurse may perform some initial analysis of the patient and then depart. The physician will then, typically, follow the nurse's visit and perform a physician examination of the patient. A follow up visit from the nurse may then be required after which the patient, depending upon the results of the examinations, may be taken to an ancillary service provider, such as a lab technician or to another clinic in the same facility, for additional test work. Finally, the patient may be taken to an exit area where payment for the expenses of the visit and scheduling of the next visit is arranged. With the increasing size of many physician practices, large numbers of patients may be concurrently going through processing at the physician's clinic through different examination rooms with a variety of nurses, physicians and lab technicians. The patient's records are typically tracked by providing a patient specific file containing the patient's examination information, both from the current and previous visits. The file is moved along with the patient from location to location within the clinic. There also may be service provider associated locations such as the physician's clinic and/or nurse's stations within the clinic. Multiple clinics may be located in one building or campus allowing a patient to schedule interdependent visits with multiple providers.
As the scale of medical clinic operations increase, the complexity of tracking both the physical location, movement and status of patients as well as maintaining control over patient related information becomes increasingly challenging. Accordingly, a variety of approaches to tracking patient flow or movement and data acquisition have been proposed. An example of such a system is a push button system. A typical push button system involves manual push buttons at locations within the physician's clinic and indicator lights, typically put at a remote location from the examination rooms, such as a panel in a location visible to staff members to allow calling of a staff member by a doctor. Buttons are pushed by various staff members and physicians to indicate their locations and indicator lights are driven responsive to the push buttons to provide, for example, an indication to others of where a physician is located or when a staff person is needed. An example of such a system is the Expeditor System from Expeditor Systems of Alpharetta, Ga.
A variation on a push button system involves the use of keyboard entry of data by staff members to allow more detailed, patient specific information to be entered into a tracking system. Keyboard entry systems are typically offered for use in environments with highly variable flow paths for patient treatment where the added expense of maintaining keyboards for input and committing staff to data entry connected with patient tracking may be justified. A further variation on a push button system is the Client-Tel system from Client-Tel of Milford, N.J. The Client-Tel system provides a chart rack with detectors in the reception area. When a patient arrives or an urgent message is received, the chart or message is placed in the slot of the rack associated with the requested service provider based on name plate designations on each slot. An indicator light is then activated at a remote location from the rack next to the corresponding name plate of the person who is requested to check with the front desk for a message or to meet a patient.
A further variant of prior approaches are systems directed primarily to tracking clinical information as contrasted with patient flow control. Such systems have been proposed which utilize computer data processing and storage capabilities to increase the accessibility and range of patient records available to service providers such as physicians. With the advent of smart cards, variants on such systems have been proposed that utilize a patient smart card which can be maintained by the patient allowing the patient to bring with him to a service provider extensive information regarding the patient's medical records in an electronic form. An example of such a system is the Berdy SmartCard.TM. from Berdy Medical Systems in Rochelle Park, N.J.
A further variant on push button patient tracking systems includes the addition of infrared tracking to locate and follow the movement of individuals, typically, physicians. Utilizing such systems, the presence of a physician carrying an infrared transmitter is detected from infrared receivers located in various locations in the medical clinic such as examination rooms. However, such systems require additional burdens on the physicians and/or patients as it requires that an additional device, which may be easily misplaced or forgotten, be maintained on the individual. If the infrared transmitter is forgotten or lost, the expensive overhead of the sensor system becomes unreliable and fails to provide the desired information. An example of such a system is the CS2000 from Varitronics, Inc.
Each of these approaches suffers from various limitations. For example, push button indicator systems, in practice, tend to be unreliable as the service providers do not consistently operate the push buttons resulting in a breakdown of the patient status logic. Push button systems also typically do not track patient specific information. In contrast, keyboard based systems which provide for patient specific tracking of flow and data acquisition suffer from the added complexity and expenses of making keyboards available for data input and utilizing additional staff member time in entering the additional information manually.